In my opinion, associating a person based on the way they speak English to a specific stereotype is wrong and just plain rude yet people don't realize they do it everyday. Whether it's a conscious decision or not, people tend to associate a specific ethnicity group to a stereotype instantly based on the way they speak.
The world is beginning to be exposed to an array of different languages resulting in diverse accents. In the world today, it is believed that there are 7,099 languages that are still expressed. Although English is the lingua franca of the world, there needs to be acknowledgement that English is not the only language spoken. It is estimated that 1.5 billion people speak English. When you think of 1.5 billion people, you think that's quite a lot right? But do you know how many are actually native speakers? Only 360 million out of those 1.5 billion. That isn't even half of the percentage of non-native speakers. So why is it that we associate non-native speakers with disrespectful stereotypes if non-native speakers are what make up the majority of our language?
Looking into Amy Tans story Mother Tongue, she addresses issues with stereotypes that her mother is labelled to because of the English that she speaks. Because it's not as complex as other people's English automatically allowed people to assume that she is uneducated and apparently gave people the right to treat her poorly. When I think about what her mother goes through and the feelings that Amy Tan expresses, such as being ashamed of her when she was younger and not noticing how broken her English was, is something that I find very common in my household with both of my parents.
In my experience, my mother is a non-native English speaker who speaks, to some extent, broken English as the story Mother Tongue names it. Originating from Puerto Rico and learning Spanish as her first language, my mother still finds it hard to express ideas in English therefor leaving her either code switching or speaking in an English that is somewhat understandable but not "correct". Because of this simple English she speaks, she's been identified as being uneducated, of a low socioeconomic class and has been treated poorly by other people because of the "wrong" English that she uses to expresses herself. In contrast to these stereotypes that she's been tagged to, my mother is educated.
Not only do non-native English speakers fall into categories of hurtful stereotypes, native English speakers can also experience the horrible stereotype tagging. For example, my father, who is a native English speaker, is from Indiana where the majority of people speak Southern English. Although he is a native English speaker, people tend to affiliate him as being a "redneck" who supports white supremacists, is considered to be poor, white trash, who sits on the porch of his home with a gun in his hand on a rocking chair just because he speaks with a country accent and uses Southern vocabulary such as "ain't" and "y'all". There have been people who don't take him seriously because of this and there have been people who make fun of him and ask questions like "you're actually smart?" or "wow, so did you grow up in a trailer?". When looking at the stereotypes that are linked to language use, you need to consider both perspectives of non-native and native speakers, as there are always stereotypes for both like I just explained.
As explained in a section of an article from Quartz called "How our brains treat foreign accents", it analyzes what happens to our brains when we hear foreign languages and how hard it is for us to understand different types of accents when they're not familiar. Apparently "we're less likely to believe something if it's said in a foreign language" explained Lev Avri within the article. But why? What makes an accent or way of speaking less credible than another? I personally will never understand why because it shouldn't. When you put yourself into the perspective, would you like it if someone were to automatically pin you to a stereotype because of your use of language. I don't think so. So the next time you hear someone and automatically think that they must be uneducated, they must be racist, and think to yourself that you should ignore them or treat them differently, don't. Think about if that were you...
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